Category: Entertainment

Oh my word, this is absurd (in the most deliriously awesome way)! It’s called “Decotora” (or “Dekotora”) and it’s Japanese, oh… so… very… Japanese. They look like moving Vegas slots crossed with downtown Tokyo AND Time Square. As Avi Abrams says on his site Dark Roasted Blend:

“They might not look very refined in the daylight, but at night they shine in the most inimitable way. If you meet such an embellished apparition on a highway at midnight, it may either scare you off the road, or cause you to start to believe in alien encounters. The amount of chrome on these babies is probably equal to a monthly chrome production of a small African republic. I have to admit I’m still scratching my head after seeing this.”

Amy Sedaris was on Conan O’Brien last night, promoting her twisted and hysterically funny hospitality book I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. She offered a great tip, for when company comes, and you want to find out who snoops through your medicine cabinet: Load a bag of marbles into the bottom of the cabinet and shut the door. If anyone opens it, it’ll make a tremendous racket as the marbles bounce into the porcelain sink. She added: “Then you can find out which one of your friends is a thievin’, drug-addicted whore.”

Have other Street Techies messed around with Songbird yet? It’s a media browser build on a chewy Mozilla center. It’s pretty cool. You can import your iTunes, and other local media libraries, and you can scour the Web for media (music search engines are built in). One of the nifty things it does is, when you hit, say a music blog, it looks for MP3 (and other) audio files on that page and presents them to you as a playlist, below the regular page content, so that playlist sorta becomes a soundtrack to the content you’re reading. If you decide you like a track, you can drag it into your library (and you can subscribe to RSS feeds). It allows you to do many of the things you can do in iTunes. No CD import and burning yet, but it’s coming, as is other extensions. And no, it won’t talk to your iPod.

I sorta don’t know why you’d want a separate media browser, but it’s nice to have an open source alternative to iTunes and Win Media Player. I sorta wish this was just a Firefox plug-in. I bet this would be a dream app if you were a music junkie who spent a lot of time reading the indie music press and blogs and scanning the Web for new music and vids. I like how their bird mascot is always farting. Classy.

The app is cross-platform (Mac, Win, Linux), but only on release 0.2.1, so only for early app adopters.

Here’s an interview that Xeni did with the developers when 0.1 was released back in February.

Saw this awesome ad spoof on Gadgetopia and a news item about the Mac Guy (Justin Long) bailing from future “Hello, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ads ’cause he’s too busy being a movie star. Wha? What movies? Dude, I’d stick with the steady paycheck and the every night TV exposure. When’s the last time you saw the Dell guy up on the big screen? Or the little one, for that matter.

I-Wei, the Fabricator General at the amazing Crabfu Steamworks, sent us links to three steampunk- inspired PC clocks he did “a while back.” The one shown here, SteamClock, belches steam while the two gauges show hours/minutes and seconds.

He made two other clocks, SunClock and DragonClock. They have nifty little features such as animated watchworks, day/date display and a RAM/CPU usage indicator (which doesn’t appear to be accurate of either, but still looks cool). The clocks work on Windows PCs and float over other apps. Here are links to the three EXE files:

SteamClock
SunClock
DragonClock

Screencaps of SunClock and DragonClock after the jump…

Thanks, I-Wei!

Hey, it’s nepotism week here at Street Tech! (What’s the blogosphere for if not FOR promoting yourself and your friends and glad-handing people you want to suck up to?)

You all obviously know Mark from Boing Boing the blog and maybe bOING bOING the old print zine and Wired/Wired Online. But what you may not be aware of is his considerable talent as an artist and illustrator. It was actually his art in the first few issues of bOING bOING that first captured my attention. I was thrilled when he and I started to exchange letters and zines and he submitted some comics to my early ’90s zine Going Gaga. Over the years, I’ve been equally honored to have him work as an illustrator for some of my books, most recently, the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots and Leo Laporte’s Guide to TiVo (a.k.a. Gareth Branwyn’s Guide to TiVo).

So I am totally thrilled that he’s finally getting his due as an artist. This Friday begins his first gallery show, at Roq La Rue in Seattle. It’s a group show (Mark has nine acrylic paintings in it) with four other artists, including Lynne Nailor and Chris Reccardi who both worked on Ren and Stimpy. The show runs through December 2. If I were the rich dot.com mogul I am in my mind, I’d fly out there in my Moller Skycar for the opening and snatch up a couple of these sweet canvases.

Congrats to Mark from all of your pals and admirers at Street Tech!

Last December, Gizmodo ran a “Biggest Dork” contest that we blogged about. In that posting, I talked about a picture that I wished I’d had to send in, of my son Blake, sitting at his grandmother’s Unix terminal. Well, we finally found it. Are we too late for the contest? I guessed that the picture was of him at 3 or 4. It’s actually from the Spring of 1989, so he’s just shy of 2. His grandmother was a researcher at Bell Labs and she had a dumb term in her house. Blake is working in a Unix drawing program (ever the artist, that kid). Look at him work that mouse. Look at that mouse!

So, what does this have to do with the price of volatile memory in China? Not a thing. Pardon a papa blogger’s indulgence. And apologies to the boy.

Thanks, Sande!

PC World has come up with a list of what they think are the worst ten video games of all times. They’ve been a LOT of crummy games over the years and some of the ones on their list are undeniable (like their #1 pick, ET for the Atari 2600 (above), is a no-brainer), but Prince of Persia: Warrior Within one of the ten WORST? Worse then Carmegeddon N64? Worse than Spice World (PS), the game based on the Spice Girls? And IronSword, the NES game that features Fabio on the cover? And if you’re going to include something like Super Columbine Massacre RPG, then why not Ethnic Cleansing, and other hate mongering titles (of which there are many, enough to easily fill a list of ten)? There are still worthy candidates here, such as the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, Shaq Fu, and Make My Video with Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. Oh, and then there’s 2005’s Elf Bowling for the Nintendo DS. That’s right, a commercial console release of the play-for-a-day 1999 freebie Windows title.

From Kotaku:

“The Sith Lords Restoration Project is an attempt by mod collective Team Gizka to create KOTOR2 as it was meant to be played.

[From the Project team:]
“We’re adding back in as much of the cut content as is possible. We are dedicated to forming a coherent story out of these sound clips and occasionally-ambiguous action descriptions, so unfortunately, we cannot include every single cool thing that was cut. But, we will still have plenty of coolness, including:

* The long-lost HK Droid Factory! (not the same as the Droid Planet M4-78)
* Several ways to murder Visas!
* A whole new group of people who want to kill you!
* Multiple endings! (no, really, actual endings)
* Various ways to be responsible for the deaths of all your party members!”

One of the many cool things about YouTube is the amount of historical tech-related material that’s finding its way onto it, and how people are aggregating this material in useful, enlightening, and entertaining ways. This piece from PC World is a perfect example. They’ve assembled a bunch of computer TV ads, many from the early days of the computer revolution. Some of the ads you’ll recognize, others you won’t. It all forms an interesting snapshot of a now quaint and fondly-remembered (at least speaking for myself) time. There are ads going all the way up to the current PC guy/Mac guy ads. One fun addition is an allegedly never-before-seen second Apple “Switch” ad with Ellen Feiss, the stoner-esque teen who became a 15-minute celeb after her first spaceous performance. Mercifully absent is the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” dude. But who can live without the Shatner VIC-20 commercial (shown above)? Priceless.